Monday, July 7, 2014

Here’s The Map North Dakota Leaders Didn’t Want You to See


Well, I don’t want to always be the bearer of bad tidings, but it is good to know what is going on in the world around us. In the words of British philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.” The Dakota Resource Council has brought us some knowledge this week about bad things happening around us, namely oil industry spills.

The DRC has helped to publicize a map that leaders in North Dakota state government didn’t want you to see.

It is a map of all the oil, saltwater and other hazardous materials spills in North Dakota’s oilfield since 2000. It is ugly. It makes me sad. You can look at it here. It is an interactive map. You can zoom in and out, and click on any of the thousands of little dots that denote a spill and it will take you to a link with the North Dakota Health Department’s oil incident report for that spill. See a dot next to the farm you grew up on? Click on it and find out what happened. It’s that easy.

What you get from this map that you don’t get from the Health Department’s  hazardous material spill website is a sense of the magnitude of the problem and a look at “hotspots” where so many spills have occurred in a small area that it is obvious there is a problem that needs to be addressed by environmental authorities. For example, go to the map and look at the small area south of Marmarth, in the extreme southwest corner of the state, where the map shows more than 200 saltwater spills, 150 oil spills(although most of them small), and 50 “other” spills which included things like the solvent methyldietthanolamine (MDEA), emulsion, drilling mud, oil mist and source water. These spills are outside the Bakken and occurred mostly before 2011, in an area where there was a mini-boom, headquartered in Bowman, in the early part of this century, before all the rigs were pulled out and sent north to the Bakken when that play became so profitable.  MORE
Well, I don’t want to always be the bearer of bad tidings, but it is good to know what is going on in the world around us. In the words of British philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.” The Dakota Resource Council has brought us some knowledge this week about bad things happening around us, namely oil industry spills.
The DRC has helped to publicize a map that leaders in North Dakota state government didn’t want you to see.
It is a map of all the oil, saltwater and other hazardous materials spills in North Dakota’s oilfield since 2000. It is ugly. It makes me sad. You can look at it here. It is an interactive map. You can zoom in and out, and click on any of the thousands of little dots that denote a spill and it will take you to a link with the North Dakota Health Department’s oil incident report for that spill. See a dot next to the farm you grew up on? Click on it and find out what happened. It’s that easy.
What you get from this map that you don’t get from the Health Department’s  hazardous material spill website is a sense of the magnitude of the problem and a look at “hotspots” where so many spills have occurred in a small area that it is obvious there is a problem that needs to be addressed by environmental authorities. For example, go to the map and look at the small area south of Marmarth, in the extreme southwest corner of the state, where the map shows more than 200 saltwater spills, 150 oil spills(although most of them small), and 50 “other” spills which included things like the solvent methyldietthanolamine (MDEA), emulsion, drilling mud, oil mist and source water. These spills are outside the Bakken and occurred mostly before 2011, in an area where there was a mini-boom, headquartered in Bowman, in the early part of this century, before all the rigs were pulled out and sent north to the Bakken when that play became so profitable.
- See more at: http://theprairieblog.areavoices.com/2014/01/23/heres-the-map-north-dakota-leaders-didnt-want-you-to-see/#sthash.XPjRG0P8.dpuf

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